Narrowing

One of the most enduring ideas in Evangelical Christianity has to be the Narrow Way. If you don't know the scripture, I'll give you the New International Version so you can get the full Evangelical experience.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13-14)

My experience hearing this scripture interpreted has been through the lens of Salvation. Or at least Salvation the Evangelical way. What Jesus means here, we were told, is that very few will get to heaven and many will go to hell. That's because it's hard to follow Jesus, I guess. Or maybe it's hard to hear the good news of a narrow path to salvation in order to avoid eternal conscious torment. Hard to be certain even with utmost certainty. That was the Baptist way, anyway.

Matthew 7 is pretty beautiful in terms of teachings, and to me summarizes Jesus wonderfully. Even Jesus thinks so, inasmuch as he says, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (verse 12)." For the first third of this chapter he talks in terms that have fairly baffled readers, offering opportunities for pretty wide-ranging interpretations. When Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you," what does he mean? And the injunctions not to "give to dogs what is sacred" or "give pearls to pigs" are downright bizarre on their face.

The Narrowing Class - those Christians convinced of their narrow view of salvation -  will have answers. They will have received answers over years of Bible Study and Sunday sermons. The interpretations they've accepted invariably support the Narrowing view, the sense that most people won't get it, most people won't accept the hard truths Jesus prefers. I suppose they will believe that they have removed the planks from their eyes and have a clear view of the specks obscuring everyone else's vision.

I personally believe that Jesus is right when he says that the road to destruction is wide. Being human is difficult. Part animal, we're always looking for the easiest way to survive and thrive. Part god, we feel the tug of compassion and empathy for other humans in our path. For most of us most of the time, meandering down the wide path is our default behavior. Being selfish comes easy; avoiding the difficulties of thinking of others is perpetually tempting; focusing on our own success is usually our only priority. If most of us are doing it, we must be on a pretty wide path or else we wouldn't all fit.

If that wide road leads to destruction, then what does destruction look like? The Narrowing Christians would say Hell, but that's too easy. I think destruction looks like narcissism. It looks like prioritizing your own success. It looks like doing to others what you don't want done to you, and doing it to them because it's convenient or easy. Ultimate destruction is the evil of treating everyone else like shit and in the process thoroughly corroding your soul.

I think that most Christians have an inkling of what the narrow path means because I believe that all people do. If God is written into our living fabric, if the divinity within each of us is the God of the universe, than we're all tuned in to a common understanding. The narrow road is generosity. It's magnanimity. It's kindness, selflessness, and grace. The narrow road is empathy and mercy. It's all of the things that are hard for animals who are focused only on surviving, but easy for a God who never dies and is made entirely of love.

Sungods

In many ways and at many times throughout history, human beings have worshiped the sun as a god. Really there is nothing more natural for humans, a fact you’ve easily noted if you’ve ever stood in the warm sunlight on a crisp fall day and felt the perfect symmetry of the moment – the hot, bright light beamed from unknowable distances, the crisp chill air hovering against your mammalian-warm skin, the way that time stops when you close your eyes against the sunlight and bask in its ubiquitous brilliance.

Sun worship is about as human a pastime as you can imagine. And why not? The sun brings the new day: new promise, warmth, the beginning of they cycle of life once more. The sun makes things grow, which is the promise of life. The sun has a rhythm that we can predict, and predictability is the definition of human security. And the sun is mysterious. What is it? Where is it? How can it be everywhere and also just right there – way up high and white hot bright, so shiny and intense that it’s impossible to look at, impossible to simply and directly see?

The default view of the divinity of the sun is wonderful in so many ways. The beauty of the sun is that it connects every living thing on earth together. No one above ground avoids the sun’s presence, and the connection among humans is strongest. The sun’s presence in our lives is the great universal, the unifying theme of human experience. It transcends time and place and culture and, except for the tricky nature of idolatry in some instances, even religion.

The sun’s resemblance to a godhead is fascinating. In the Christian and Jewish traditions, God is an omnipresent and omnipotent deity whose judgment none can avoid. Like the sun: everywhere, all powerful, equally applicable. The sun doesn’t care where you live or what you believe, it will burn you if you spend too much time exposed. The sun is coming for you…or is it? The sun is simply doing what it does when it washes the world in light and heat and UV rays, when it punches up the chlorophyll of greenery, when it burnishes our melanin. Like God, the sun acts according to its nature; naturally it’s hot and bright and so massive that the planets in our solar system are irresistibly drawn around it in an eternal and mysterious dance. Theology should be so beautiful.

What I love about the sun that can be hard to love about the gods of human theology is its unassuming criticality to life. Without the sun there is no life, yet it doesn’t need prophets and profiteering preachers to sing its praises to elucidate that reality. The sun is literally at the center of human life, a fact that is central to human understanding, that can’t be denied. It’s worth worshiping because its existence is complimentary to our own.

We could just as easily curse the sun for sunburns, droughts, desertification and death. It would be simple to blame the sun for the perils of winter, bemoaning its relative absence for causing frostbite, sickness, and dark dreary peril. Surely we could build a theology of spite and anger around this great bright force that seems to control our days and seasons, this inescapable light that fills every exposed crevice with gold, only to slink away in the evening and allow the darkness to drench the world again, for a time, for a season. What is this godlike orb that it has such pull on our very existence?

If we fail to see the divine nature in everything that is, we’re left instead with the void of the divine all around us. The sun is an easy candidate for divinity, but why not all of creation as well? Let the sun be a god, and its light be divinity shared with the world. Let the grass then also be gods, and the trees, and the birds in them. Let the rocks by so divine that they cry out their own names, the name of the God who has made all things and inhabits all things and is, even now, making and remaking all things. As a flower goes to seed and seed becomes another flower still. Let that be divine. Let it be the same God that hangs in the sky each day, promising renewal, warmth, danger, mystery, and moments of perfection.

Gospel Ordinary

The Gospel is the good news that Jesus preached. If you had asked me in my youth what that good news was, I would have answered something about salvation from sin and the death and resurrection of Jesus. I think you’re likely to get the same sort of answer from an Evangelical Christian of just about any protestant denomination. A Google search will most certainly produce similar insights.

The angel who told the shepherds about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth said, Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy. That angel was relaying good news (Old English god meaning "good" and spel meaning "news, a story”) to an earthy, quiet group in the middle of the night. That angel was sharing gospel, and that gospel was the birth of a poor baby in unromantic circumstances. The good news was that human life, no matter how humble, is glorious.

Church is an interesting thing to experience. I’ve spent most of my life going to one church or another, and the thing about attending an American Evangelical Protestant Christian Church™ is that it’s tremendously normal. If you go to church, no one will necessarily notice. However, if you go to church and get involved and exhibit the characteristics desirable for the practice – obedience, piety, religious fervor, devotion to the faith – you will usually be celebrated. The churchgoing experience provides opportunities for ordinary people to be celebrated by peers.

It feels good to be celebrated, and it’s likely that most of what we do in life we do in search of being celebrated. Friendships have mutual celebration as their foundation; well, good friendships do. We’re drawn to people who make us feel good about ourselves, even if that feeling is fleeting. To be human is to be social, and to be social is to be insecure. While we each possess insecurity to varying degrees, we all possess it nonetheless. Every human being wants to be celebrated, to have our insecurity assuaged. Ideally we will be celebrated simply for who we are.

Herein lies the good news of Jesus of Nazareth; the man who, as a baby, was celebrated by a sky full of angels simply for being born. Born to a young girl who knew very little about life. Born to a young carpenter who was probably quite poor. Born in an animal pen in a dusty backwater town. Born like all of us are – humbly, writhing and bloody, made in the image of a creative deity who surely imbues our existence with meaning.

The Gospel then is a celebration of each one of us, and spreading the good news is as easy as loving every other human simply because they are. You don’t have to possess the right skills, exhibit the proper behavior, recite the creeds correctly, or believe the same stories. It shouldn’t require anything of you for us to celebrate the miracle of your existence. And it shouldn’t require anything of us for you to do the same in return. The good news is that we’re all human, we’re all in the same boat, and we all contain mysterious multitudes. To be in this world is to be divine.

I don’t know just who this man Jesus of Nazareth was, or whether his mother really was a virgin, or if his birth was the culmination of a sweeping divine narrative of reconciliation and spiritual redemption. I can’t attribute motives to his life, the ways he taught common people and ran in the circles of society’s rejected class. But this much seems obvious – that Jesus brought good news to people, and celebrated them for who they were without requiring anything of them. Personally I like that kind of news.